


Where I can't follow

by ferggirl



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-08 15:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/pseuds/ferggirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a year since Jemma jumped out of a plane to save her team and Grant followed her. When her work again puts her in danger, the team must bring in others to try and save her. (Basically... zombies.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Infection

**Author's Note:**

> This photo of Elizabeth Henstridge (http://notababoonbrandishingastick.tumblr.com/post/72936733880/notababoonbrandishingastick-lloydgrints) gave lots of good ideas. I am not very conversant in Marvel canon, just the MCU, so please be kind.

There are protocols in place after the incident with the plane. No one wants to expose the biochemist to another virus like the Chitauri one she’d only just survived. 

The dwarves must approach first. Gloves and careful handling. 

All things, Jemma argues, that she’s always done. 

They go a year without incident. Once or twice the dwarves catch a hint of something especially vile and Fitz drags her back away from the corpse, initiating lockdown over her objections.

But Jemma chafes and complains that this over-protectiveness diminishes her place on the team. Coulson lectures Fitz about the dragging. 

So they’ve relaxed a bit when they land outside the quiet Italian town. It’s chillingly empty, and the dwarves scatter, seeking clues as to the blight that covers the land. 

Looking for people. 

When they find one, she’s half gone, a flesh-eating virus of some kind busy dissolving flesh hungrily. She moans weakly at them and dies before their eyes. 

Jemma dons a hazmat suit, but insists on a post-mortem.

She’s narrating it over the comms to the group watching in the conference room when it all goes horribly wrong.

"And here," she says, "this is where the liver should be - the virus hasn’t reached that yet, but it’s just gone. As though it was ripped out violently. Perhaps a creature…"

They all see what happens next. The woman in pieces on the table  _moves_. One moment she’s a cold slab of destroyed flesh, and the next her one remaining hand is grabbing at Jemma’s arm, pulling it inexorably toward her mouth.

Jemma screams. 

Ward gets down the stairs first, and finds the doors locked from the inside.

"Let me in, Simmons." He pounds on the glass as the rest of the team joins him. "We need to get you out of there!"

"It’s a bit too late for that, I’m afraid," she says, holding up her torn sleeve and showing them the wound she’s just scrubbed clean with the strongest disinfectant they have on board.

"Jemma," he says, low and afraid. "We’ve been through this before."

She looks past him, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Proper zombies, Fitz! Reanimation after death! Make sure to note how long the period was when you write the paper.”

She gasps, looking down at her arm as it blackens.

"I’m getting the bone saw," May says, heading to the supply closet.

"We’ll just cut it off." Skye’s eyes are as wide as saucers. "Fitz will build you a new arm. It’ll be fine."

Fitz is white as a sheet and dead silent. 

Jemma steps back, watching in fascination as the flesh on her arm withers.

"My, this is moving very fast. It would appear that it’s in the bloodstream, proliferating through the capillary veins." Her voice is shaking a bit. "I hope it doesn’t - only please kill me before I eat my own liver."

May comes back in time to hear the hypothesis, a brutal saw in her hand. 

"It’s not going to come to that," Coulson promises. But his face is stark as he pulls out his phone to call headquarters.

Skye rounds on Fitz, trying to shake him out of his stupor. “We have to do something, what can we do?”

"Another anti-serum?" Ward hasn’t taken his eyes off her face the entire time. "Tell us how to help, Jemma."

She looks back at him slowly, painfully. “It is my professional opinion that I should be quarantined until the process is complete and you can safely d-dispose of me.”

The half of a woman on the table reaches her arm toward them, and Ward curses loudly. 

"Something ELSE, Jemma," Skye gets up close to the glass. "There has to be something else."

"I’m sorry." She’s pulling at her clothes, suddenly too warm. "I assume it is affecting my brain, I’m having a very - it is not easy - sentence…"

"No!" Skye’s crying, and May reaches to pull her back away from the lab doors. 

"Freezer."

They’re the first words Fitz has uttered. He blinks a few times and then gestures furiously at the rest of them to move. “We have to put her in a coma, as cold and as close to death as possible. Slow it down. Buy us time. NOW!”

Coulson opens the doors. May shoots her with the night-night gun, and Ward catches her on a plastic sheet, carefully wrapping the diseased flesh so that it cannot touch his own as he carries her dead weight to the interrogation room. 

Coulson and Skye slide the squirming decayed corpse into a hermetically sealed barrel. Fitz reaches for the controls to the interrogation chamber. 

"You have to secure her, Ward," he warns, adjusting the temperature as low as it will go. May helps Ward strap her to the table, then nods to the camera as she pulls the younger agent out of the room. 

"Oh god, please work," Fitz murmurs as he hits to the button to seal off the room completely. The temperature drops fast. Ice crystals form on Jemma’s lips and on the hexagonal plates that make up the walls and ceiling. 

He zooms in on her arm and waits.

At first the spread is fast, creeping up to her elbow steadily. But as the room gets colder, the blight slows down. When it seems to have stabilized, just below her shoulder, they all give a cry of relief. 

Ward goes back in, then, and hooks her up to sensors so they can keep her cold but alive. 

Coulson gives May new coordinates and they prepare to take off as SHIELD sets up a perimeter. He collects a few things from his office and then walks back into the lab.

"Containment will be key until you find the cure," he says to Fitz. "I’ll stay here and oversee the efforts."

"You’re not coming?" Skye asks, stunned.

"The man you’re going to see isn’t level 7," Coulson says with a shrug. "He can’t know I’m alive. Simmons is more important right now."

Then he’s gone, chatting in Italian with the government liaison on the airstrip. 

"Where are we going?" Fitz looks at Ward and Skye, who is already keying in the coordinates Coulson had said to May.

"Stark Tower?" She’s baffled. "But why?"

"Doctor Banner," Fitz breathes, laughing in terror and disbelief. "We’re finally going to meet Doctor Banner and Jemma’s a bloody zombie."

Ward’s lips tighten as he watches her, still and cold and alone. “I just hope he knows what the hell to do.”


	2. The cargo bay (again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After five long minutes of hanging in the air, a metallic knock resonates through the cargo bay.
> 
> Grant pulls out his gun. Fitz and Skye look at each other in confusion. But May opens the door from her seat in the cockpit.
> 
> "You need to give Simmons to him," she says coolly across the intercom. "Be nice."

It should take them six hours to reach New York. May gets them there in three. They hover just over the East River, waiting for instructions on how to proceed. 

It’s not exactly SHIELD procedure to transport a live “zombie” virus through the most populous city in the United States. 

After five long minutes of hanging in the air, a metallic knock resonates through the cargo bay.

Grant pulls out his gun. Fitz and Skye look at each other in confusion. But May opens the door from her seat in the cockpit.

"You need to give Simmons to him," she says coolly across the intercom. "Be nice."

"Give him Jemma?" Fitz’s pacing increases drastically. "We can’t move her now. The only thing keeping her even slightly alive and out of the grasp of that… of the… well, the only thing keeping her alive is the stasis induced by the frigid temperatures of the interrogation chamber. We’ll need a reinforced refrigeration truck or a - a large freezer at least."

Skye is white-knuckled and silent. Grant is watching the slowly opening door.

Because there’s only one person in New York he can think of who would  _knock_ on a plane.

And right on cue, the moment the opening is wide enough, Iron Man himself lands in the cargo bay with a metallic clomp. 

Skye makes a strangled noise. Fitz freezes mid-step. 

The helmet disassembles itself and Tony Stark shoots the three of them a grim smile. 

"I’m here to see about a zombie?"

Grant’s hands curl into fists at the word - no matter who it is speaking, that is  _Jemma_ on that table and he will defend her humanity to his last breath. But there’s no humor in Stark’s eyes, so he forces himself to relax his stance and put away his gun.

"She’s in the interrogation room," Grant says, leading the way. "We’ve been trying to keep her cold."

Fitz unfreezes in time to key in the lock code and let the two men into the makeshift freezer. 

Jemma is there, her withered arm stark against the icy white of the table surface. Grant is finding it very hard to breathe properly. 

"Jarvis? Gonna need that bag," Stark says, and a box emerges from the side of his suit. He hits a few buttons and it opens, revealing a quickly expanding bag of heavy green plastic. By the time the bag finishes growing, it’s as tall as Grant. "Insulated, comes with handles to make sure she’s securely attached to the suit. Best we could do in a couple of hours."

Grant nods, thinking very firmly to himself that it looks like a large lunchbox -  _not a body bag._

They unhook her from the table, still wrapped to prevent any accidental contamination, and place her gently in the bag. Grant turns away as Stark closes it. 

"I’ve got a helicopter ready to take your team directly to Avengers Tower," the billionaire says when he’s finished. "I heard there was a barrel of actual zombie?"

They lift the bag - Grant at her head, and Tony Stark at her feet - walking it back to the cargo bay. Fitz and Skye are wrestling the barrel out of the lab, and Stark nods his thanks. 

"Stand back," he warns them, and when they’ve moved far enough he welds the lid shut, then welds several high-tensile cables to the barrel itself. All of these hook to the suit. "Don’t want to lose it."

Jemma’s bag he holds more like a person. Then the helmet goes up, and he’s gone, taking her with him. 

Grant’s mouth twists as he realizes that once again Jemma Simmons has left via the cargo bay to save her team. He just can’t catch her this time.


	3. Avengers Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fight to save Jemma begins, with Ward stuck on the sidelines.

The helicopter ride to the top of Stark-now-Avengers Tower is a long one. Grant’s never minded flying, but his stomach roils as they cross the East River, having secured the Bus at LaGuardia.

He tells himself it’s the stakes of the thing.

An entire town in Italy. The potential for a European plague. The damage they could unleash right here in New York through Jemma.

_Jemma._

That’s really what it boils down to, if he’s honest with himself. He can’t accept that they’ve – that _he’s_ lost her. He doesn’t want to imagine his days without her smile.

“Do you think they can… fix her?” Skye’s been uncharacteristically silent, so when her question to Fitz crackles through the headphones, Grant takes it as a good sign. “Banner and Stark?”

Fitz looks grim, his hands clutching at his thighs as they turn up 5th Avenue. “Bruce Banner is an amazing doctor. His work on anti-electron collisions is the best there is. But he’s a nuclear physicist first and not… not whatever we need.”

“We don’t know what we need,” May says shortly from her co-pilot’s seat. “Stark has the best equipment in the world, and we’ll have two geniuses working on this, plus you, Fitz.”

It’s the right thing to say. As they settle onto the helipad, Fitz straightens his shoulders and they can all see a sense of purpose come into his eyes.

He can help.

Grant has never been more jealous.

******

It’s a long day. Fitz is swept immediately to the lab, the rest of the team hovering awkwardly in his wake until a tall blonde with six-inch heels and an air of unshakeable authority introduces herself as the CEO of Stark Industries and guides them to another room where they can wait and watch.

Pepper Potts and Melinda have history and things to discuss, so Skye and Grant drop into chairs close enough to the 40-inch display that they can hear the discussions in the lab.

Most of it is medical, and theoretical, and terrifying. She’s in an isolation pod, her temperature carefully maintained and sensors covering her blackened arm. They’re discussing disease patterns and skin decay and it’s clear Fitz is barely holding onto his sanity when Tony asks what the likelihood is that her nervous system’s been compromised.

That’s the point at which Grant leaves to go punch something.

Stark’s AI pipes the audio from the lab down to the workout room at his request, and he maintains a steady rhythm on the standing bag until the bone saw starts up. He just slides down onto the mat, head in his hands, and listens as three geniuses take a calculated risk and try to separate the virus from the woman.

Skye comes to find him a few minutes later, tears streaming down her face.  She sits next to him, and leans a head on his shoulder.

“This sucks.”

It really does. He leans his head on hers, in a moment of shared desperation and sadness. “How’s Fitz?”

“I couldn’t stay in the room,” she says. “But I’m pretty sure he’s puking his guts out.”

“Can’t blame him. I was pretty close myself. I should have stayed with… er, in Italy,” he admits, catching himself before he drops Coulson’s name into the ever-listening AI’s ear. “There’s no point to me here.”

“That sounded awfully self-pitying for a super-spy. And we both know you couldn’t have watched us leave with Jemma in such trouble.” Skye’s teased him before about his growing affection for the biochemist, so when she straightens enough to nudge his shoulder affectionately with her own, he just shakes his head in necessary denial. She wipes at her eyes, collecting herself. “One of us should go find Fitz.”

“I’m sure he’d rather see you.” Grant summons a ghost of a smile as she stands back up, hands clenched with determination. “Let me know if I can… help.”

“If someone needs to be punched and May’s not available, you’re on,” she says. Her weak grin means she was trying for a joke. It doesn’t help fill Grant’s already gaping inner void of uselessness.

Melinda shows up a few minutes later. He’s back on his feet by then, re-wrapping his hands so that he can go another round with the bag.

“She came through,” she says bluntly. “As long as the virus is gone, she should survive.”

“Her arm?”

“She’s got Stark and Fitz,” May says, “she’ll get a new arm.”

She holds his gaze for a minute, and he can see the worry and relief hidden deep within her controlled calm. There’s a pity there, too, that he doesn’t really understand. He likes to think he can read May better, after their fling early in the team’s timeline, but he’s probably kidding himself. He sees what she lets him see.

“Pepper’s got food upstairs. Everyone needs a break. Shower and come up.” It’s not a request.

He stops by the observation room first. Jemma is heavily sedated and immobilized in a new isolation chamber. Grant can see a blanket draped over the site of the amputation. They’re slowly raising her temperature again, now that the infected tissue is gone, and she looks somewhat less deathly pale.

It gives him hope enough to stomach a meal.

Stark and Banner don’t come out of the lab to eat, insisting that they’re making progress on sequencing the structure of the virus they pulled from the “live” carcass collected in Italy.

Fitz is white as a sheet, his hair wet and curly from the decontamination shower Skye pushed him into. Grant can see she’s being careful with him, her hands gentle as she guides him to a chair, or touches his shoulder to repeat the question of what he’d prefer to eat for the third time.

He’s proud of her.

They eat in relative silence until raised voices from the lab grab all of their attention.

******

Everything is muffled when she wakes up.

And dark. Her eyelids refuse to obey her command to lift.

She’s unbearably cold.

Jemma can hear muted voices and tries to turn her head in their direction, to ask for help, to get their attention.

But her body seems to be betraying her. No matter how hard she thinks the action, nothing happens. She starts trying smaller movements – fingers, toes, mouth – but nothing responds.

Her mind whites out in terror and she slips back into the safety of unconsciousness.

******

“She definitely woke up,” Banner says, concern twisting his mouth into a scowl. “On her own. Based on what you told us about how the disease advanced I think that’s a good thing. I can keep her under, but it will be much easier to assess her condition if she’s awake and talking.”

Stark leans over and swipes a crispy potato wedge from Pepper’s plate. “What Bruce is trying to say,” he says around a mouthful of food, “is that we need her talking. Not panicking.” When no one responds, he looks to Pepper.

“Who is going to be the most calming influence when she wakes up?” she asks May directly. “Agent Fitz?”

“No!” he says, panic written all over his face. “God, no. She’d know in an instant that I was a mess and nothing stresses her out more than not knowing why. Skye, you should…”

She shakes her head. “Same problem, different person. I’ll just start bawling and it will help no one. You want calm, you want May.”

But the older agent is ready with her own reasoning. “I don’t think Agent Simmons finds me especially reassuring. If Ward doesn’t feel up to it, I will, but I think he’s a much better choice.”

Skye and Fitz turn to look at him, and Grant swallows a bite of food that’s turned to sawdust in his mouth. This is his purpose? To break the news of a forever changed life to a woman who deserves none of what has happened to her?

“I’m not comfortable lying to her,” he says slowly, addressing Banner. “If she asks what’s happened, I won’t hide the truth.”

“That’s fine,” Banner’s nod is understanding. “Tony, you and Agent Fitz should work on the prosthetic while the anti-serum formulates. Agent Ward? The sooner we do this, the better.”


	4. Out of the dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma wakes to find Ward at her side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was started pre-HYDRA and will stay that way. Even more AU now, I suppose.

This time, the noises are sharper. There are electronics in the room, clearly, as the beeps are drilling a shrill, repetitive hole through the back of her head.

The voice is loud, unbearably so, and unfamiliar. If she could, Jemma would flinch away from the noises, or bring her hands up to cover her ears. Her head feels cavernous, huge and empty, allowing the sound to rattle around and ping off of all her raw nerves. But as she still seems to lack most basic motor functions, she braces herself and listens.

“Blood pressure is holding steady, that’s a good sign.”

Footsteps ring on a hard floor, and Jemma is very relieved to hear medical terms she is familiar with. Her ears start to ring, and that combined with her extreme sensitivity to noise causes a headache to pound at her temples.

“She’ll be lucid soon, and likely very disoriented. The effect of the paralytic agent may take slightly longer to wear off, but she’ll be conscious and aware of what’s going on around her.”

A paralytic agent? Who is this doctor that he cannot tell she is conscious now? Where is her team? Is she so alone?

“So,” a second voice, one she knows very well, speaks slowly. Grant Ward. Just knowing that he is there, somewhere in the darkness with her, calms Jemma. “Will you know when I should – should talk?”

The other man is silent for a moment, and Jemma pictures him flipping through a chart or observing medical machines as she tries to remember just what happened… _why_ she is under medical care.

“If she can’t already hear us,” the doctor says after a moment, “it should be any moment now.”

They drop into silence again, and while she waits for further information, Jemma decides to test her limbs. She most wants to open her eyes, to look Grant in the face so his warm brown eyes can tell her just how much trouble she’s in, but she tries her toes and fingers, knowing that extremities are usually the first to respond.

Nothing yet, but she does have the sensation of lying on a padded surface, the feel of a pillowcase beneath her head, and a sheet resting over her chest.

It’s more than she had before.

She lets her mind drift back to a favorite class on the central nervous system and its responses to poisons and toxins, playing a game of elimination in her head as she tries to decide what paralytic agent she has accidentally consumed.

Then his hand closes over hers. She can’t squeeze back, but her sensitive nerves greet his touch like warm sandpaper. Despite the roughness of his skin, she welcomes it, this tether to reality.

“Jemma?” Ward says, adjusting his hold on her hand and leaning in to speak closer to her ear. It’s unnecessary, and his question is amplified by the increased throbbing of her headache. “I just want you to know I’m here. We all are. The whole team. You’re safe now, but you were hurt, and we need you to wake up and talk to Doctor-.”

A hesitant noise from the doctor cuts off the name Ward is about to say.

“-I mean, talk to us. So we know how to help you.”

Something beeps loudly, just behind her, and this time she does flinch. She feels her hand jerk under his, and thinks that her head moves, slightly, on the pillow.

“There she is,” Ward murmurs, and Jemma wants to smile at the memory of his head in her lap in that supply closet.

“If she’s awake, I can increase the dosage and scrub her blood faster.” The doctor sounds kind. And a bit  like those old lecture tapes of Bruce Banner she’d studied in her third year. “As long as we’re sure she isn’t a danger to herself.”

******

Grant’s been in plenty of high-pressure, life or death situations before. He’s saved himself, the team, total strangers and innocent bystanders without his heart rate spiking once.

But he’s not above admitting fear. And right now he’s terrified.

He looks at the list of questions Bruce Banner dropped into his lap and swallows hard. At the top are a series of “squeeze once if…” options for just such a scenario.

_What color is an apple? Squeeze my hand when you hear it._

_What is my name? Squeeze my hand when I say it._

_Squeeze once if you are right handed. Squeeze twice if you are left handed._

_What animal does Fitz most want to have in the lab? Squeeze…_

He can see Skye’s hand in these questions. They’re personal, simple for the Jemma they all know. A few correct answers will have everyone breathing sighs of relief.

But he’s always been one to prepare for the worst.

His mind inexorably drags him there. If she doesn’t respond, if her answers are all wrong, if Jemma Simmons is damaged beyond repair, what happens then?

Grant doesn’t know how they’ll hold the team together. He isn’t even going to contemplate his own feelings on the matter. Those he’ll shut them down in that dark place he never goes, because missing those smiling brown eyes and the sunshine she brings into every room would hurt too much.

He glances over at the severed arm, resting in the hermetically sealed glass case for further tests as needed. It’s gruesome and dangerous and morbid and just begging for a scientist to poke at it.

She’ll love doing it herself. If she’s still in there.

Her hand twitches again in his, and Banner nods encouragingly at him from his seat at the panel of instruments. The doctor seems to think his name will frighten Jemma. Grant is inclined to think that, if she’s still herself, it will bring her out of her coma in sheer excitement.

But he’s willing to try the questions first.

She passes with flying colors. The only hesitation she demonstrates is when he asks her if she remembers what happened, yes or no.

Her hand lies still in his for that one, and he knows she’s working, trying to piece together what she has with what she’s learned since waking up.

He wishes he could delay that, the waking up. Save her the next discovery.

But Banner smiles and increases the flow of blood through the detox machine, and it’s not long before her eyes flutter open. He lets his hand tighten on hers and exhales in relief as she squeezes back.

“So?” It’s a simple question, weighted down with all that she does not know and he has to tell her. Her eyes are clear, and he knows she expects the truth.

“There was a virus, Jemma.” It’s true, and the agreed-upon tactic to start this conversation. “We need to know if it got to your brain.”

She turns her head away, taking in the lab surroundings, and a piece of hair slips free of her ponytail, sliding into her face. He leans forward to brush it away, but he’s not fast enough.

She tries to use her free hand. Her other hand. The hand that should be there.

But it isn’t.

******

She assumes for a moment that one side is just slower to respond. Grant tucks her hair behind her ear and she smiles a thank you, then turns to see what the problem is.

Her vision tunnels and the noises of the lab dim to a high-pitched buzzing.

Her arm is gone. Her left arm is _gone._

Jemma wiggles her shoulder in stunned fascination and watches the bandaged stump move up and down.

Grant has to tug her face back to look at him. “Jemma, listen, you’re going to be ok.” His voice sounds tinny and far away.

Her pulse is racing, her just-warmed skin feels clammy and cold and she can’t seem to catch her breath.

Those symptoms at least, she knows. She’s careful to enunciate clearly, as patients are known to slur.

“I believe I’m going into shock, Agent Ward.”

Then the room spins out of focus and she can hear him calling her name as she sinks into blackness. 


End file.
